Marie Brennan - A Natural History of Dragons

The weather held fine for most of the morning, but as the afternoon drew on, clouds grew on the mountaintops and rolled in our direction. One of the carters shot at a wolf that was following us too closely, scaring it off. He and his fellows held a brief conversation (in the impenetrable dialect of their native region, not the more refined Chiavoran the rest of us knew), and decided to press on; they judged this a bad area to camp in, even if it meant a wetting before we arrived in Drustanev.

As the wind picked up, I tied my bonnet more firmly to my head. The clouds seemed very low. I had a book out which I had been attempting to read, and for a time I tried to go on doing so, bracing my forearms along the edges of the pages to keep them from flapping about. From the wagon bench at my side, though, Jacob nudged me and said, “You might want to put that away. I fear it will rain soon.”

I sighed, but he was right. Closing the book, I turned in my seat and reached over the back of the wagon bench to stow it in a pack that would all too soon prove whether it was as waterproof as advertised or not.

As I did so, a gust of shockingly cold air pulled at my sleeves, and ice stung my face. Wondering if we were in danger of hail, I looked up.

I have little recollection of the next several seconds. Just a moment of frozen staring, and then—with no transition—my voice shrieking “Get down!” as I wrapped my arms around my husband and dragged him forward, off the wagon bench.

Two other screams overlaid my own. One, high-pitched and awful, came from our driver as claws snagged him off the wagon and into the air. The other, lower but even more terrible, came from above, as the dragon plummeted from the clouds and raked over our heads.

Jacob and I landed in the wagon traces, the reins and harness tangling our limbs while the horses shied and whinnied their terror. Being on the outside, I tumbled free first, and cried out to see the wagon lurching forward, my husband still caught within. He fell a moment later, directly beneath the wagon, and the wheels passed close enough to leave a track across his coat.

I crawled toward him, hearing shouts from all around us. Frantic glances skyward showed me nothing; the dragon had vanished again. From the slope ahead, though, came the agonized groans of our driver. Just as I reached Jacob, a loud noise cracked the air: a gunshot, as one of the other drivers fired off the rifle he carried against highwaymen or wild animals.

Wild animals. I had not, until that moment, put dragons in that class. I had thought them something apart.

“Stay down, Isabella,” Jacob said, shielding me with his own body. I crouched in his shadow, and realized quite irrelevantly that my bonnet had gone astray. The wind was very cold in my hair.

A great flapping, as of sails: the dragon, though we could not see it. Looking under Jacob’s arm, I saw Lord Hilford put out a hand and stop his driver, who would have fired at the sound. With nothing to see, there was no point in wasting the round.

Then suddenly there was something to see. Several shots rang out, and I swallowed the protest that tried to leap free of me. This was no vulnerable runt in a menagerie. The dragon was huge, its wingspan far larger than a wagon, with stone-grey hide and wings that kicked up dust with every beat. The guns fired, and the beast made a dreadful noise, aborting its stoop on us and climbing rapidly for the sky. Clouds enveloped it once more, and we waited.

Waited, and waited, until at last Lord Hilford sighed. “I think it’s gone.”

Jacob helped me to my feet. My bonnet was caught in a low, scrubby bush; I retrieved it and smoothed it out with shaking hands while Mr. Wilker and one of the other men went after the driver the dragon had seized. Its claws had left great gashes in his back and chest, but the worst injury was to his legs, which had broken badly when he fell. Blood seeped out where the bones had breached the skin. If I had not seen a similar injury once to a horse, I might have fainted.

“Make room for him in one of the wagons,” Lord Hilford said in Chiavoran, then turned to me. “Mrs. Camherst, if you would—in my green chest there should be some laudanum. Black bottle, in the top rack.”

I crammed my bonnet back onto my head and did as he asked. There were bits of grit and rock in my palms, which I picked out as I went, and I had torn my skirt, but seeing the driver, I was acutely aware of how lucky Jacob and I had been. Had I not seen the dragon coming…

Rain began to fall. Mr. Wilker bound up our driver’s wounds as best he could. We needed to get him to shelter, but first there was his cart to deal with; the horses had quite understandably bolted at the approach of the dragon. They had both gone lame, and the wagon had overturned, spilling our trunks onto the ground and knocking one of them open. Working together, the men retrieved everything while I created a makeshift canopy to keep the rain off the injured man. The laudanum, fortunately, put him into a shallow sleep, and he did no more than moan in protest when we moved onward and the road jolted him where he lay.

In this manner, bedraggled and scarred, we arrived in the village of Drustanev.

I did not see much at first of the building that was to be our home for the next several months. I accompanied the injured driver as some locals carried him inside, and tried to explain in my very bad Vystrani what had happened. I expect that little of what I said even registered on them, between my limited vocabulary, appalling accent, and atrocious grammar, but one thing I did notice: the villagers did not seem surprised to see his wounds. No one could have mistaken them for anything other than dragon-inflicted, even without me repeating that one word over and over again— balaur, balaur —and they did not seem surprised.

Relatively approachable Lord Hilford had called the Vystrani dragons, that first evening at Renwick’s when I heard of his expedition. It was not the phrase I would have chosen.

A young woman appeared out of nowhere at my elbow, tugging me away from the men now swarming through the downstairs of the building. Using a flood of incomprehensible Vystrani, she seemed to be trying to convince me to sit down in a quiet place and have vapors over my misfortune. I’m afraid I gravely disappointed her by haring off into the rain, my already-ruined bonnet listing to one side on my head, to make certain our things were being brought inside. It seemed a minor thing to worry about, with howls emanating from a back room where they were trying to set the driver’s broken legs, but I was no use there, and could not abide sitting around and doing nothing.

My efforts averted a buildup of trunks in the front hall that would have made passage impossible. By repeating those few parts of my Vystrani vocabulary that were relevant to the situation, accompanied by much gesticulation, I managed to get some of the local servants to shunt our luggage upstairs, to the rooms we would sleep in. Jacob found me in the midst of this, and insisted on examining me for injuries. He exclaimed over my skinned palms and had Mr. Wilker bind them up, although by then they were hardly bleeding at all. For my own part, I conducted a similar examination of Jacob, and was relieved to find that his coat might have been badly torn along the back, but his skin was nothing more than scratched. An inch less into our fall, and the dragon would have caught him like the driver.

The noise in the back room subsided at last, and Lord Hilford appeared, weary and bloodstained. “He’s asleep again,” the earl said. “Whether he’ll survive… well, we shall see. Come.” We followed him obediently, Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and myself, like very lost and unnerved ducklings, into a room off the front hall.